Paper short abstract:

Many tourists who visit the remote East Kimberley town of Wyndham in Northern Australia have personal connections to men that once worked there. These tourists often lament the end of a time when a particular set of working-class values dominated the colonial frontier.

Paper long abstract:

Self-drive tourists, including the somewhat infamous Grey Nomads, inch their way around outback Australia, stopping in towns and caravan parks. The small East Kimberley town of Wyndham is one such destination that sits at a dead end in the Great Northern Highway. Many tourists that make their way there have connections to the town through brothers, fathers, uncles and grandfathers who worked at an abattoir which operated in the town from 1919 to 1985. This paper explores the experiences of these tourists, who often describe feeling saddened by what they see as the diminishment of the town, provoking nostalgia for the dominance of a particular set of working-class values about labour on the colonial frontier. Though this 'nostalgic workerism' (Ferguson 2013) imbued with particular gendered and racial ideations is unlikely to have been a reality in a workforce that included women, ethnic minorities and Aboriginal people, it is nonetheless a pervasive discourse among tourists. Nostalgia is actively cultivated by Wyndham residents and business operators who see this particular kind of tourist, often described as a 'visitor', as one of few possible (and desirable) revenue streams for the town. Ethnographic reflections in this paper consider 'tourism at the end of the road' as doubly constructed - Wyndham's location, and the supposed end of the road for white masculinities of working-class labour in Australia.